Storage dominates Sun product releases

Storage has dominated Sun Microsystems' third-quarter product development, with the company unveiling three new storage systems and adding storage management software to Solaris.

In terms of software, the firm has integrated Sun StorEdge Traffic Manager into its upcoming Solaris 10 platform, currently in beta. The offering is designed around predefined policy rules designed to deploy storage resources and make systems management easier.

These features enable companies to arrange data depending on which application needs it, according to Chris Atkins, Sun UK storage product marketing manager. "The focus is on reducing cost and complexity," he said.

According to Sun, demand for application-based rules for storage pooling and provisioning - included in the Solaris 10 beta - has been prompted in large part by increasingly tight compliance requirements.

The company has produced 14 pre-tested rules profiles deployable for such things as a proprietary database (Oracle or Sybase, for example) or for email.

New hardware includes the midrange StorEdge 6920, high-end StorEdge 9990 - developed by Hitachi Data Systems - and StorEdge 5210 network attached storage (Nas) device.

Developed entirely by Sun, the 6920 is available with utility pricing starting at 80 cents per 'Sun Power Unit' per month in the US.

The units, which can be plugged into multiple server and array platforms, can scale up to 250TB and 68GBps throughput, according to Atkins.

The StorEdge 5210 Nas is a heterogenous file server appliance for simple 'black box' management, and again uses policy-based services.

"We are seeking to integrate software, hardware and services, and integrate them into a customer's heterogeneous environment," said Atkins.

In addition to the storage enhancements of its forthcoming Solaris release, Sun has added an implementation of Java 2 Standard Edition 5, codenamed Project Tiger, and Sun Studio 10 for developers on AMD Opteron and Intel Nocona 64-bit applications.

According to the company, 400,000 copies of Solaris 10 have been downloaded, and it is being used by 6,000 channel partners in Sun's early access programme.

Other software releases include new Sun Cluster software for improved resilience for business-critical application.